


Recovery

by Perspicacia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: A few cameos of other characters, Family Reunions, Gen, Grand Master & Grand Padawan, Post Star Wars Rebels, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-04-27 18:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14431131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia
Summary: Ahsoka came back alive from her fight with Vader but not exactly in good shape. Bail Organa promptly sent her for some recovery time with one of his most mysterious contacts in the Outer Rim.





	Recovery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveronthetree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveronthetree/gifts).



> Many many thanks to Countess of Biscuit for the beta!

Ahsoka survived Vader. 

That was more than all but one Jedi could say. 

For all she knew, it was more than  _ all _ Jedi could say. She had limped out of the confrontation, partly because of Vader, partly because of the Emperor’s attack from some other plane … and she did her best to not think about the possibilities of travelling to the other planes she’d seen and changing everything. Some things were better left alone. 

She survived because of a young man named Ezra, because of the Force, because of  _ time travel.  _ And how confusing all of  _ that _ had been. 

But she was far from her best. Physically, she just ached, but her mind still reeled from the fight. She felt like her very soul was bruised, hurt and maimed in a way even those without the Force seemed to notice.

“You’re a mess,” Rex remarked, not bothering with tact, when he saw her again. She would have glared at anyone else in the galaxy, but for him she only gave a faint sigh at his mother hen habits and accepted his hug. Rex gave really good hugs. 

“You need rest,” Bail Organa said when he visited her in Yavin’s infirmary, and really, had everyone become a trained medic in her absence? The Senator seemed to hesitate when he seated himself on the chair next to her bed. She could feel only that he was … worried, but no more. Of all the non-Force-sensitives she knew, he was one of those less prone to leaky thoughts and unguarded feelings, and it was probably for that reason he was still alive, still playing spy in the Senate after almost two decades. 

“You can’t fully recover here,” he said later. “If the Alliance doesn’t work you to the bone, all our struggling and frayed hope will be enough to mess with your mind in this state.”

“How do you know so much about the Force?” Ahsoka asked, too exhausted to hide her surprise. 

His smile was sad. “I had many good Jedi friend, once.” 

And solicitous of old wounds, she said no more. Years and countless hours of meditation later, the extermination of the Jedi still cut her to the core, and she hadn’t the strength to add his grief for the dead to her own. 

When Bail had offered to send her away for a few days, to a rebel agent that was—in his words—only to be contacted in the most desperate circumstances, she thought he was just trying to pawn her off in the kindest way he knew how. She still said yes. She was useless right now and that agent couldn’t really be so important, if she, Fulcrum herself, had known nothing of them. She would check in on them, meditate as much as she could handle in her state, sleep as much as her nightmares let her, and come back to the Rebel Alliance effective once again. 

All her plans derailed when the supposed contact opened the door of his sad little hermitage. For a second, she feared her mind had finally broken down. She was seeing things—worse, she was seeing dead people! Aged, weathered-down and too-short dead people, with a face stained by tears. 

It was the  _ too short  _ part that convinced her. 

If she had hallucinated her deceased Grand Master, he would have appeared as from a memory: red hair, a smirk playing on the corner of his lips, as tall as the Jedi Order itself, a pillar of calm in the war, always with a comforting cup of tea to offer—even in the most violent warzones—and a saucy comment. 

“You’ve grown so much,” whispered the man and a sob escaped Ahsoka. She threw herself into his arms. Not only was she taller, she was stronger than him too, and in her enthusiasm, she lifted him off his feet and spun him around. 

And he laughed, he  _ laughed _ , the impossible man, wonderfully alive, wonderfully whole, impossibly Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“Come, come,” he said, still crying, still laughing, and he pulled her into his home, took her cape, and made her tea. 

Not for a second did his eyes stray, like he too needed to be sure she was real. She felt dizzy and not from the long journey to Tatooine. And she had so many questions, she didn’t know where to start—she was too busy looking at him to even begin! It was only after the second cup of tea that they were each able to speak in more than broken sentences. 

“I can’t believe Senator Organa hid you all those years like…like some sorts of mistress in a holodrama!” Then realisation struck. “ _ You’re _ the mysterious dead Jedi friend!”

“I’m not dead, but Bail and Breha Organa are dear friends, even if circumstances have prevented us from seeing each other for years.”

Another realization came and she felt ill again, grimacing at the unthinkable truth of Anakin’s fall… 

“Master –”

“Obi-Wan, dear,” he corrected gently and her heart stuttered in her chest because his heart would break at what she had to say.

“Obi-Wan, I have terrible news for you. Ana—Vader … he…” She struggled with the rest and he took her hands in his own.

“I know,” he said.

“Oh no, Master, believe me, you don’t—” Ahsoka replied and only a lifetime of controlling her feelings kept her from becoming hysterical. 

“Ahsoka. I know who Vader is,” he insisted, the set of his mouth grim. 

Announcing that he was the Emperor’s long lost son would not have been more surprising. 

“But…but how?  _ How _ ?!” 

“Who do you think put him in that suit?” Obi-Wan said matter-of-factly. 

She looked at him, struck as though one of Tatooine’s rare storms had rolled in with his awful words and its lightning had singled her out. 

What he said was impossible. Not the Team. Not her Masters, two halves of a whole, not Skyguy and Master Obi-Wan, not  _ them _ . 

Her mind went blank for a few seconds, the information too enormous to apprehend, let alone understand. Obi-Wan just stood and instead of brewing a third cup of tea, poured them both a strong, almost unpalatable alcohol. 

“It’s made from cactus,” he said with a nonchalance he couldn’t quite carry. 

It burned her tongue and her throat and smelled a little like the cooling liquid used on older freighters motors, but it cleared her head something marvellous.

“Tell me everything,” she ordered—not as Ahsoka, but as Fulcrum

He did. 

He spoke for a long time, his eyes lost in things she couldn’t see. He talked about Cody and his men, shooting him of some Force-forsaken cliff. About Bail Organa rescuing him and Yoda from the madness in the Senate. About the Temple and what they had seen there. About Padmé—brilliant, loving Padmé—who hadn’t believed him about Anakin’s choices. About Mustafar, his tone clinical and matter-of-fact, because it was probably the only way he could talked about maiming his brother so terribly. 

Night came and he had paused for a moment to build a fire in the small hearth as the temperature dropped, then he boiled them some cereals and served them with pickled vegetables. She didn’t insist that he continue speaking; the meal offered a respite they both needed. 

Once they had eaten, he began again. When he revealed Padmé’s fate and the existence of twins, Ahsoka wanted to curse in every language she knew.  

“That’s an awful burden you would place on their shoulders.”

“Yes, it is. Nevertheless, my hope is that they won’t be alone to bear it. The Alliance is growing stronger every day. And they have Bail and Breha, and they will have you, and Master Yoda, and me, as old as I’m getting…”

She didn’t answer. To  _ see _ Luke and Leia. To train them. Could she? As Kanan as trained Ezra? 

“I’m no Jedi,” she said and it felt like a confession of guilt, for all she had proclaimed it proudly in front of Vader. 

Obi-Wan smiled.

“Not a Jedi of the old, no. Something new, something strong and young.”

“I am  _ broken _ ,” she said, suddenly, because it was true. Because she was exhausted from fighting Vader and wasn’t sure her soul would heal from the assault on her very essence within the Force. 

“My dear,” he said and he took her hands again, “you’re only in need of recovery. And the desert will provide that.” 

They went outside, in the cold of night, and ran through a long series of katas at half speed, eyes closed, dancing around each other as if they had trained together for the last twenty years. It was far more exercise than she had attempted since coming back but her body handled it until the end.

That night he tried to nobly exile himself to the couch—a generous term for a rock with a bantha pelt thrown atop, not fit for anyone, much less a man so aged. She didn’t relent, however tight the bed was for the two of them. Lulled by his Force presence, it was the best sleep she had had in years. At one point in the night she realized he was curled around her back, despite his smaller stature, like he was trying to protect her. In the dark, she smiled and let sleep take her again. 

The next morning, she woke up alone and with something needling the back of her mind. It had been so long she needed a moment to identify it. In the Force a tentative … bond was blossoming. Not that between a Master and Padawan, no… more the sort that had been cultivated by war, between two Knights working together, trusting each other implicitly. 

After a quick sonic shower, she followed it. Obi-Wan was meditating in the shadow of a dune. For a moment, she swore there was another silhouette standing nearby, but she dismissed it upon second glance as a trick of the heat. 

Obi-Wan’s eyes were closed and he was so, so peaceful in the Force, like he wasn’t present in that corporeal form, but one with the dune, with the dust in the air, with the galaxy itself. She joined him, assuming the same position. He smiled but kept his eyes closed. 

“There is someone I want you to meet, Knight Tano,” he said, strangely formal. 

“Young Luke?”

“Yes, him too. But first…” He took her hands in his own. They had touched more in the last twenty hours than they had in all the years they’d known each other, before the dark times, like they were still marvelling in the other’s presence.

“You’ve grown so much. You’re wise beyond your years. It is you who should be called Master and me the learner. There is only one final thing that I can teach you.”

He opened his eyes. They had never been clearer or more blue. 

“I want you to meet your Great-Grand-Master and to learn what he taught me here, during my exile.”

“Isn’t he dead?” she asked, too surprised for a more considerate response. 

Obi-Wan just smiled and he opened up to her in the Force, guiding his Grand Padawan one last time.

  
  



End file.
